Journal Of South Asian Literature

How to Navigate the Journal of South Asian Literature for Research

I spent three weeks trying to track down a single article from the 1960s through the Journal of South Asian Literature before I realized I was approaching the whole problem backwards. The journal, which ran under that title from 1955 until it was rebranded and restructured over the decades, covers literary criticism, poetry translations, and cultural analysis centered on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the surrounding region. It is published by Springer on behalf of the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. Getting at the material is not straightforward if you do not know what you are looking for, and even people who have been doing this work for years still hit the same walls. The first thing most researchers get wrong is assuming the journal exists as a single continuous run under one name. It did not. The publication went through several transitions. It started as a quarterly called South Asian Literature, later became the Journal of South Asian Literature, and was eventually folded into broader publication channels under Springer's catalog. The renaming happened around 2006 when Springer took over distribution. Before that, it was associated with the Sahitya Akademi and published by different entities. This matters because your search strategy depends entirely on which era you are targeting. If you are looking for articles from before 2006, Springer's platform will not show them correctly. You need to know where else to look.

Journal Of South Asian Literature

Here is the practical part. I need to explain how I actually find articles in this journal, because the standard approach almost never works the way you expect. When I was working on a project about post-partition Hindi poetry translations in the 1970s, I needed issue-by-issue access going back to the early 1970s. Springer's interface would only show me the post-2006 material. The earlier content was scattered across multiple databases, and some issues had been digitized incompletely. My workaround was to use the Indian Serials Registry and cross-reference the library holdings at the National Library of India in Kolkata, then use interlibrary loan requests to pull specific issues from universities that had physical copies. This is slower but it is the only way to get complete access to pre-digital issues. For post-2006 material, the SpringerLink platform is the primary source. You can access individual articles or subscribe to the journal. If you are affiliated with a university, check whether your institution has a Springer package that includes this title. Most research universities in the US and Europe do. If you do not have institutional access, individual article prices run between $35 and $50, which adds up fast if you are doing serious research. There is also the option of purchasing a personal subscription, but that is generally not cost-effective unless you are reading exclusively from this journal. Let me talk about something most guides skip over: the indexing situation. The journal is indexed in Scopus, the MLA International Bibliography, and the Abstracts in Anthropology. This sounds like good news, but it creates a real problem. Because the journal is listed under multiple titles during its transitions, citation searches can split your results across different entries. If you are doing a literature review and your search comes up short, it is very possible that relevant articles are indexed under the older title South Asian Literature rather than the current one. I always run parallel searches under both names, and I also check the Indian National Bibliography for entries that might not have made it into the major indexes.

Another thing that trips people up is the language scope. The journal publishes primarily in English, but a significant portion of its content involves translations from Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam, and other South Asian languages. When you are searching the database, the translation pieces often do not list the original language in the abstract, which means keyword searches for a specific language or author may miss relevant material. My approach has been to search for both the translated work and the original language terms separately, then manually cross-check. It takes more time but it catches things that automated searches miss. If you are looking to submit your own work to the journal, the process is peer-reviewed and the acceptance rate is competitive. The editorial board prefers scholarly articles that engage critically with South Asian literary traditions, including contemporary and classical work. Translation submissions are accepted but they must include substantial critical commentary and annotation. I learned this the hard way when a colleague of mine submitted a straight translation without enough apparatus and got a desk rejection within two weeks. The journal wants the scholarship to carry the translation, not the other way around. There are real limitations to keep in mind. The journal has a narrow focus, which is both its strength and its weakness. If you are researching diasporic South Asian literature written in English, French, or other non-regional languages, this journal may not be the best fit. The editorial scope tends toward work rooted in the subcontinent itself. Also, the digitization of back issues is incomplete. Some volumes from the 1960s and 1970s exist only in physical form at select libraries. Researchers working on older material need to budget extra time for interlibrary loan requests and should not expect everything to be available online.

The ISSN for the current version is 0037-8496 for the print edition and 1877-0770 for the online edition. You can find the journal on SpringerLink at springer.com/journal/11562. For the historical material, the Sahitya Akademi maintains some archived copies, and the University of Texas at Austin's South Asia collection also holds physical volumes. I would recommend starting with your institution's library database, running searches under both the old and new titles, and then falling back to interlibrary loan and physical archive requests for anything that does not come up digitally.